Abstract

The “appeal to vigilance” against the resurgence of the far Right, launched by forty Left intellectuals last summer, generated one of the most bizarre ideological controversies France has witnessed since the threshold year of 1981, when the Left joyously came to power pledging to “change life.” Coming four months after the Left's worst electoral debacle in recent memory, the Appeal may mark the end of a political era and signal the final demise of the engagé intellectual identified with Sartre. The message was that the rise in racism and the resurgence of the far Right were due essentially to the Lelt's lack of vigilance against the growing legitimation of the tar Right, and that this had occurred because some Left intellectuals had deviated from orthodoxy in considering other explanations and had debated these issues with an intellectual of the New Right (Alain de Benoist).